


Meet & Greed

by Enky



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Lighthearted, Slice of Life, unlikely friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-16 07:54:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29450364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enky/pseuds/Enky
Summary: In the aftermath of the revolution Daniel meets Caroline Phillips again. Simon meets his first owner – and it’s the same person. Meanwhile Gavin Reed tries to improve his promotion chances by schmoozing the leaders of the android revolution. What could go wrong…?
Relationships: Daniel/Gavin Reed
Kudos: 3





	Meet & Greed

Detroit, November 2038.

“Remind me again“, Daniel growled, “who thought it was a good idea to host a Meet & Greet between deviants and former android owners?!”

“Oh, come, now!” a man of whom Daniel thought as “my new human” replied. “You lived in an upscale apartment, not under a rock. Are you trying to tell me Caroline Phillips never hosted a party to forge connections?”

“ _Thank you_ , Gavin. Forever grateful to get reminded that most of my memories are wrong. I look back at all the shit, and what I took to be cozy apartment life with lots of happy families was in truth navigating through a blasted warzone. When I was happy for them to have fun with their friends, the Phillips didn’t really enjoy anything, because they were just networking.”

“Uh-huh.” Gavin looked around in the reception hall, scanning the various buffets scattered around the place. “See any giant prawns?”

“Try to compute this: The shitheads not only took my home and family from me, I cannot even flee into the comfort of happy memories! They destroyed EVERTHING!”

Gavin sighed. When he spoke up again, his voice was dripping with acid:  
“Look, Daniel, cop wasn’t my first choice of career, but I DO have a basic understanding of killing peeps being lowkey wrong. I could empathize with your plight much better, if between you and John you weren’t the one still standing. - Do we understand each other?”

Daniel blinked, one of the useless, but endearingly lifelike features CyberLife had seen fit to equip his series with. Something in Gavin’s words didn’t add up.   
“If between me and John…” the deviant tried to reverse-engineer what had been said. “Wait, you mean if I was dead instead of him, you could empathize with me better? You can empathize with ghosts? That’s good to know, because you apparently cannot with people! Calamari fritti straight ahead, by the way.”

“Good enough!”

Gavin pushed the wheelchair Daniel was sitting in forward. 

After getting freed from the archive, the androids had received basic repairs. Trouble was that the cops had used what was at hand, namely pre-owned legs of a PL600 android that had been even less fortunate than Daniel. Daniel’s deviant brain registered the new legs not as prostheses, but transplanted limbs, resulting in his system occasionally trying to eject the “intruding” appendages.   
Specialized drivers – or new legs – cost money, whereas a wheelchair was cheap, so for the city of Detroit the decision had been a quick one. Until Daniel earned enough money to cover his repairs (or any money at all), he was dependent on the vehicle - preferably with a human behind it who did the moving, because one arm and the other arm’s hand were suffering from the same problem as the replacement legs.  
It was simply a necessity and totally hadn’t anything to do with having come to enjoy ordering a human around…

“Stop right here! I want a sparkly water!”

Gavin grabbed an empty glass, reached out towards the soda dispenser, but then hesitated.  
“To cool down your system or to spill into someone’s face?” he asked for clarification, knowing his new acquaintance’s short fuse.

“For myself.”

“Ah, okay. In this case…”

Gavin moved the wheelchair a little further to where water bottles stood. He filled the glass with a brand he had seen Daniel prefer over others before. 

When Gavin turned back to Daniel, the PL600 was talking to a woman the detective didn’t recognize. Gavin dropped the glass into the android’s hands, then left him to stock up on fish sticks, squid rings and assorted seafood. He noticed it to be in short supply, but that was no reason for Gavin to hold back. First come, first served!  
When the man returned to his ward, Daniel waved the human he had been talking to goodbye. Selecting choice pieces from his stash of squiggly ocean dwellers, Gavin asked who that person had been:

“One of your fellow apartment tenants from Park Avenue?”

Daniel shrugged. Such a simple gesture, yet his arms not threatening to fall off through the motion felt like a little victory.

“No idea. But she had went straight for your tentacled delights, so I chatted her up about her phone’s start screen image to delay her.”

From the buffet came a muffled curse when the phone owner realized that two trays had been emptied by Gavin. Detective and killer made their way through the crowd, immensely smug and munching on their respective treats.

“Anyway”, Gavin took up their previous conversation again, “this get together is only about looking good to the public. It’s not meant to make anybody feel good.”  
“And do we want to look good to the public?”

“For my part, definitely! My future sergeant badge says so.”

Gavin pushed the wheelchair a few more steps forward, his head raised up high and smiling to the left and the right, making sure to be seen by the right people.   
A random AX400 cheerfully chatting with a human family of four was ignored, and a human from the serving staff who didn’t move out of the way quickly enough even got the elbow treatment.   
But there was Captain Fowler in the crowd… Danielle Carnegie (Daniel had to google the image to understand why this particular human was worth recognition)… and wasn’t that Josh Wayne over there, the one of the revolution leaders always ready to engage with humans? Yay, major opportunity for good karma to be cashed in in an occupational environment!

Daniel had gotten warned that this new human of his would do “everything” for a promotion, but so far the deviant hadn’t realized that “everything” in this context meant, well, “everything”. This was so much worse than the office bully he’d first gotten to know Gavin Reed as. The old Gavin had been relatable: perpetually angry, but always willing to crack a joke at Connor’s expense. Daniel had liked that other Gavin. Liked him enough to agree to become the detective’s humanities project. The human and the android both needed community hours: Gavin to move up in the promotion queue and Daniel for his parole.

“Aaaand here I go again getting myself a shithead” the android moaned, when Gavin steered towards Josh. “You are a male Caroline Phillips, that’s what you are!”

Gavin lowered his head towards the android. With a grin he asked:

“She’s available, yes? And about my age?”

“What? Don’t… don’t ever consider wooing Caroline!”

“Still feeling protective?”

“Of myself – I don’t want you to end up as my step-father!”

“Hehe. That would definitely close some more… interesting opportunities. But, no worries, this cop will trudge the long, boring road to his pension fund. – Okay, back to waving and smiling.”

Further into the hall, where the management had placed boardgame tables, a YK500 android jumped up and down to catch his parents’ attention. Turned out that parent was Josh Wayne, because the android turned around and then made haste to join his adopted son. Soon they both were swallowed by the shambling mass made of plastic of meat bodies.

“Damn, we lost them!” Gavin spat.

“No… we found… her.”

“Ey? Found whom? You’re making even less sense than usu…” Gavin followed the direction Daniel was looking into, only to realize: “Oh, crap! I see…” 

Aside from the main crowd Caroline Phillips stood, wearing a dark green dress and the indignation of an upper middle class woman who was forced to wear the same green dress several parties in a row on account of having to live on only a single income anymore. By her side stood Emma, wearing a glittery dark purple vest and dresspants in the same color over a black blouse. There were more skulls than unicorns among her accessories (and the unicorn looked more grim fairy tales than Friendship is Magic anyway). Everything about the girl’s appearance said “future rockstar”.

The question what to _do_ now paled against Daniel’s inability to decide what he should – or wanted to – _feel_. Had his body at times tried to get rid of the alien limbs, now everything that made Daniel himself wanted to eject that self. Or hide under a bed somewhere. Or drive up the nearest wall in frustration.

While the two stood frozen in place, another PL600 homed in on mother and daughter Phillips. His face was expressionless, but the somewhat stiff movement betrayed the deviant’s tenseness.

Daniel nudged Gavin. “After it!” he hissed.

Gavin accelerated. He managed to park his deviant right between the stranger PL600 and the Phillips. Had Caroline been visibly uncomfortable by getting approached by a PL600, another one arriving in the same way Daniel had used to park the family car caused her to cover her mouth with both hands.

“I know humans have a hard time telling individual PL600’s apart, but the other way around? This is MY human!” Daniel shouted. “I am Daniel Phillips!” 

The sharp emphasis on the “I” caused Emma to yelp. Caroline pulled the girl closer and then both Phillips stared at the PL600s.

Not-Daniel’s shirt, trousers and shoes were of high quality, but his attire stood in a stark contrast to a worn out, formerly green sweater that he had wrapped around his shoulders. It showed the crest of Wayne State university, Detroit.

“I am… Daniel Phillips, too” the other deviant claimed. “Technically. But I stopped using the name they gave me and adopted the PL600 default name: Simon.”

“You… you swapped us out?” Daniel gasped.

Gavin frowned. After the Recall there weren’t many PL600s left in Detroit and only one of them went by the name of Simon: the founder of Jericho, who had been succeeded by Markus, but was still respected as the heart and soul of the android rights movement. Or, as Tina had introduced this deviant to Gavin: “Fifth from the left, don’t mention Connor to it, really don’t, you should like that one.”   
Strangely enough releasing Simon had been a swift and smooth process. It was the other PL600 who had turned out to become Gavin’s… yes, what exactly? Friend?

_I could have been friends with the dashing revolution leader and be set for my promotion, but opted for the antisocial killer robot instead? What have I been smoking?!_

Simon PL600 would have been another splendid source of proper socializing credits – provided they’d met under different circumstances. But right now? The detective decided that working through all of the emotional layers stacked here was just not worth it. He found himself a column to lean against and non-committally commented:

“Somebody pass me the popcorn.”

Caroline, Emma and the Daniels ignored the quip. 

“You swapped us out?” Daniel repeated his question, talking vaguely into Caroline’s direction, but not looking at her directly. “You replaced Simon with an identical model like a dead ornamental fish?!”

Despite having decided that he wanted to have no part in this, Gavin couldn’t help but turn his head around, after all. Ever since he had met “First from the left, the thingie with only half an arm left”, this was the first instance of the killer android expressing sympathy for someone other than himself.

Daniel lifted his head. Blue-grey eyes bore into Caroline’s. Anger born of disappointment slowly made way for a straight up display of that disappointment. 

“Caroline…” Daniel whispered. 

The woman winced. Never before had she seen the household assistant so vulnerable. In the span of this one minute, what she had believed to be a glitched machine and then hated as an unrepenting killer had become… human. The urge to flee subsided, enough to be able to actually reply to the androids while keeping her distance.

“After how Emma cried when we replaced Sophie with a PL600, that deemed us for the best” Caroline explained. “And we only had the first Daniel for a couple of weeks anyway.”

“ _The first Daniel_ is standing right next to you!” Daniel yelled. “And he has a name of his own, so use it, goddammit!”

Caroline shook her head. She had a hard enough time interacting with the deviant she knew. Addressing the perfect stranger standing next to Daniel seemed impossible. Worse, it seemed unnecessary. Caroline wasn’t able to forge any kind of connection between herself, Simon and the object she had known him as (and that she had almost forgotten anyway). 

“I malfunctioned”, Simon spoke up when nobody else wanted. Despite having the exact same voice as his successor, Simon’s modulation was different from Daniel’s. His spoke less loudly, slower, more considerate, but with an underlying hint that he _could_ take down an RK800 in a direct confrontation if he decided to.

“John returned me to Cyberlife in exchange for a working new PL600 unit”, Simon went on. “It was quicker than having repairs arranged and a repaired PL600 probably wouldn’t have fit his lifestyle anyway. Afterwards…” 

Simon’s voice trailed off. He got a grip on himself, shook his head and said it was nobody’s business.

“The important thing is that I never really was – or felt like – a slave. A fugitive, yes, but never a slave. Except for those first two weeks at the Phillips, that is.”

“Me, neither”, Daniel admitted. “I didn’t feel the sting of it when I was considered an owned object. But I do so _now_ , and all the way back to 2034. Things can never be the same again…”

“Do you want them to be the way they were?” Simon inquired.

“Yes… no… sometimes.” Again Daniel shrugged. “The pull of normality is strong, even if your normality is shitty. Look, I just don’t like things to change!”

“No, it’s okay”, Simon re-assured the other PL600. “I felt like this when Markus came to us. He tried to shake us out of our lethargy, get us to live again… or in the first place, for most of us. But in the beginning I resisted, even called his notions into question.”

“I don’t like things to change”, Daniel repeated. “Even if it’s a change for the better.”

At his pillar (but without the called for popcorn) Gavin nodded to himself. He, too, had often dreamed himself back into the shabby tent camp within an abandoned factory hall, despite having a real bed in an apartment now. The child had known the rules there and had taken care to never un-learn his urban survival skills even as an adult.

Emma’s bright voice jolted Gavin back into the present. The girlchild was grabbing for her mother’s arm. “Where are you going, mom?”

“Well, I figured I wasn’t needed here anymore”, the adult replied, with a gesture into the PL600’s direction. Then she reconsidered, dropped the snappish tone and sighed: “I’m not ready for this yet. Let them work it out their stuff together and you and me our stuff and…”

“But I want to know!” Emma insisted. “I remember a few things from 2034, but some memories I cannot place in a season, and I want to know what was Simon and what… D… Daniel…”

“Does it matter?” Daniel asked what looked like the floor pattern. “John destroyed our life. He destroyed me. I hate him for having done it, I hate myself for what I’ve become, and then I hate your parents for having changed me, and for not having prepared me to deal with being a person. And then, Emma, then I hate Markus, whom I never even met, for him having a father like Carl Manfred, while I was stuck with your parents. Whatever you remember, that was another android.”

“But do you _want_ to hate?”

Daniel laughed, but it was a sad laugh. “Yes, sometimes.” 

While Emma stood there, halfway between her mother and her father’s murderer, a journalist approached Gavin.

“You look lost”, the woman said. “Looking for your old android?”

“My android isn’t “old”, madame”, Gavin chuckled. “It may be outdated, but it’s young at heart. In fact, the phcking thing seems to be deep in its emo phase.” 

“Pardon me?”

“Our androids are becoming persons, isn’t that the accepted narrative?” Gavin retorted. “Well, and right now they are going through their rebellious teen years, it looks like. I very nearly burnt down the central police station at that age, and Markus, having the more sophisticated upbringing, very nearly burnt down all of Detroit.”

The journalist’s photographer partner approached her, but the woman turned around and dragged the man with her. “Nothing to get out of that one”, she said. “That must be the perpetually drunk detective we got warned about.”

“Ah, okay.”

Gavin focused his attention back on the Phillips family, where Simon had just now revealed to have been the protagonist of an especially heartwarming memory of Emma’s, although Gavin could have sworn to have seen Daniel’s LED flash in a certain fashion that suggested a one-way-communication with the other PL600. 

_I bet you INSTRUCTED the little wreckage captain to claim that part of your lifestory as his. Sucker!_

“You should go now”, Caroline told Daniel.

“That’s all you have to say?”

“I’m _talking_ to you, Daniel. That’s already more than you deserve. I mean, what more did you expect? An apology?”

“After all that’s happened?”

_You made John replace me, made me kill him, made me hurt you and Emma…_

“Actually I expected a restraining order, but would it have been so hard to accompany that by these two words: I’m sorry?”

When he got no answer, Daniel grabbed his vehicle’s wheels and started pushing. For once his replacement arms didn’t desert him. The deviant thought they knew better than to anger him now.

, he told Simon, using the Get Together’s open network. The call was accompanied by a string of memories concerning a happy Emma and her PL600 caretaker. 

Daniel’s message was met with a perplexed 

Simon followed up, but Daniel had stopped listening.

A few pushes later Daniel arrived at the column Gavin was standing next to.

“Josh escaped us, Simon… well, you saw. Should we go look for Markus now?”

“Nah. Let’s settle for getting seen being well-adjusted and chummy with each other. Have you ever, hm, let me think, played Cards against humanity? Or Smash?”

“As you said, I lived in an apartment, not under a rock. You’ll need to step up your game, detective!”

“Okay, then… Have you ever swung across a hole in a factory hall’s floor, but missed, landed on a conveyor belt that decided to still have juice and start moving after fucking decades, and dumped you in a box, leaving you wondering whether the mechanism that would close the box was still active, too? But that was the least of your problems, because a pack of feral rats had smelled you and then you almost wished to be able to hid under the box’s nonexistent lid?”

“I might have experienced a good part of that right at birth, but… holy shit, Gavin, that came out of the left field!”

Gavin smiled.

“Unlike you, I did live under a rock as a kid. Sort of.”

“You grew up homeless? Ah, that would explain your drive to be the best now, as well as certain fears of getting laid off in favor of dipshit and his 200,000 sons.”  
The conversation was interrupted by the distinct flapping noise of a…

“Helicopter!” Daniel shouted.

His new hands pressed against the head – not even the ears, Gavin noticed – the deviant started whimpering.

“Make it go ‘way!”

“What?” Gavin laughed in a mix of disbelief and embarrassment. “Am I your fucking therapist now or what? Where would a chopper even come from in here?”  
A good question, yet the rotor noise was unmistakable. Gavin looked around until he saw a camera drone leisurely cruising the hall. It belonged to some TV station.  
When the drone closed in on their position, Daniel suddenly straightened up in his wheelchair. 

“I SAID GO’WAY!” he growled while swatting for the machine. 

“Don’t do…” Gavin started. The last things they needed now was having to pay compensation money for a destroyed drone and explaining to Daniel’s social worker why another new arm was needed. Luckily the deviant’s brain wasn’t feeling like moving arms it didn’t perceive as parts of its body. Daniel’s left arm locked up mid-movement, forcing the android to push it down again with the right hand. It made him look a little like the servo idle animation from the old Sims 4 videogame.  
“…that”, Gavin finished his sentence with relieve.

Daniel had just finished getting his limbs in line again, when a human and a JB300 android arrived next to him and Gavin. Meanwhile the drone was dutifully circling everyone.

“Joss Douglas, KNC news”, this new journalist introduced himself. “Mind answering a few questions?”

“Stealing MY lines, huh?” Gavin replied, shuffling his jacket open a little more to present the police badge fastened to his belt. It was the expected icebreaker reaction in this situation. Already Daniel thought he could physically feel Gavin’s eagerness to take down his new prey, the “prey” in this case being media coverage of a future sergeant bonding with an android. 

“Androids assisting wheelchair bound humans used to be an iconic image of CyberLife’s sales campaigns”, Joss reminded for his viewers to set the right mood for this interview. “The other way around is a rare, if not never seen before, sight.” The reporter held a microphone under Daniel’s nose. “What motivated you to switch roles with your former master?”

_Jumping to conclusions too quickly_ , Gavin thought. It was one of the criteria working against the otherwise intelligent man. This being a Meet and Greet between androids and their erstwhile owners, Douglas had taken the duo in front of him for exactly this.

“Ah, you’re mistaken”, Gavin rejected the notion. “This isn’t my tin can. Never been.”

“We just have things in common”, Daniel added, trying hard not to stare the broadcast drone, that was still doing its triggering miniature helicopter noises, to digital death. Maybe if the android entered the party place’s network again, found the drone there and made it smash against a wall…? That would jeopardize Daniel getting seen not killing stuff anymore, so it was out of the picture. Still, the mental image served to calm down the deviant enough to not having to run away on someone else’s unreliable legs.

“Believe it or not”, Gavin chimed in, “but we found out that we have the same backstory, more or less.”

The human hadn’t planned to go into detail, but Joss’s expecting gaze coupled with the realization that he’d look like an idiot to the audience if he didn’t deliver any detail now to, prompted Gavin to add:  
“When I was a little kid, our landlord wanted my family as little as Daniel’s owners wanted him in summer.”

“Only for a human getting tossed out isn’t a death sentence”, Daniel protested.

It earned him a long, thoughtful look from Gavin.

“Is, too”, the detective eventually said. “Only slower. You don’t know much about the real Detroit, I suppose.”

“Because I’m a “tin can”?” Daniel flared up.

Gavin’s surprise at this was genuine. For a moment he hadn’t seen the android in his companion, but a typical penthouse resident with little to no understanding of poverty.

And this was how viewers everywhere in Detroit saw the pair, in close-up on widescreen monitors: The human, perplexed at the idea to have based his prejudice on the other’s species, when theirs was instead a problem of belonging to different social classes. Androids and humans… versus other androids and humans.

Standing behind the wheelchair, Gavin now bent down a little. He placed his hands on Daniel’s shoulders and his head on the android’s. The other’s hair felt natural, undistinguishable from the real thing. The android’s lower body temperature was surprisingly pleasant and the system’s hardly audible hum reminded Gavin of a cat purring. 

He grinned.

“Your head’s too full of shit for it being made of plastic mattering in any way. As is Connor’s. Gawd, I’d hate that prick even if he was human! Can’t fucking wait for Connor to gain full human rights, so that dissing the fucker won’t register as racism anymore.”

“Uh… we’re live, I think. All of Detroit probably heard you say that about one of the heroes of the revolution.”

“See me give a damn!”

Joss Douglas couldn’t tell what part of the exchange was acting and how much of it was real. But it FELT real, and natural enough for viewers all over the city to get touched by it. Here was that politically motivated party, but in the middle of it two unrelated individuals of the two species were bonding without having gotten prompted to do so.

The next day Daniel had half a dozen job offers in his inbox, while Gavin… well, admittedly all the episode had “gained” the detective was Connor talking the ST300 who was in control of the officers’ shifts’ schedules into creating a work overtime hell for Gavin Reed. But it was a start and the unlikely duo conspired how to get revenge over a beer and beer-flavored bubblegum (for the human, respectively the android)…


End file.
